The Most Expensive GIF(s) Ever [UPDATE]

November 8th, 2011 by

 

[UPDATE 2: Things are generally working alright now on COD Elite, but everyone should take a lesson from this and remember that however many servers you have, you’ll always need more than twice as many. ^_^]

[UPDATE: Call of Duty Elite is still mostly down, but an update was posted that says that paying members will get an extra month of the service for free and the timeframe to register as a “founder” has been extended to the end of the month.  Also, now they’ve implemented a waiting system that makes you wait in line to access the website’s error page.  With this comes another GIF (!) so now users are getting twice the value for their money, huzzah!]

Behold the most expensive GIF available to gamers today.  Normally to see this you have to pay for a $50 membership or buy a $99 game bundle, but Game Usagi has managed to get a hold of it for you for free!

For those of us who have yet to get Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 (MW3), the prognosis for Beachhead’s premium stat-tracking and content delivery system Call of Duty Elite is rather bleak.  The website that costs essentially as much as a game for premium access has basically been entirely down since the game’s launch at 12:01 AM this morning.  When trying to access the site you just spent upwards of $50 for, all you currently see is a message saying that the site is down temporarily and the GIF that encompasses the whole of the website’s current features as shown above.

From my playing around in the game thus far, it’s been pretty good.  I’m still getting my mind around the several extra layers of complexity and leveling that they’ve added, but overall I think this will be a worthy game once people who fork over extra money get more than a 2-frame animated web image to look at.

The official word right now is that they’ve been receiving more registration requests than they could have imagined in their wildest dreams and that has apparently completely shut them down.  As we’re waiting with baited breath we have to wonder just how much money they were trying to save by skimping on the servers and hope that we get some kind of token apology for all of this when it’s over.

You can check the site’s status here or on their Twitter feed.